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The Vista Immersion Experiment
f0dder:
In response to Darwin in another thread, I decided to make this spinoff since the post got too long and off-topic-ish to put there.
So, up until now, my experience with Vista has been relatively limited. I've set up a couple of laptops for the museum, dealt with some minor and major frustrations, and that's basically it. So since I finally got a laptop (mark ye the historical date of October 2nd, 2008!) and needed to put an OS there, I decided to give Vista a proper spin. I've vowed to keep it on the laptop for at least the entire of October. Figured it'd only be fair to finally immerse myself in it, if I want to keep bitching at it.
So, laptop specs: Zepto Orion A15, 2048meg DDR2-800 RAM, 120gig 7200RPM harddrive, Intel GMA X4500HD graphics, 2.0GHz core2 duo P7350 CPU, Sata DVD-RW drive, Intel 5330AN Shirley Peak WiFi. All in all, a pretty sweet machine. Bluetooth makes it easy to sync my phone with MyPhoneExplorer, and it's nice having an SD card reader for grabbing photos from my camera and transferring MP3s to my Sandisk Sansa E280 (finally got an 8gig SD Micro card for it :D). I'm already finding myself using the laptop more than my workstation - gogogo reduced power consumption!
The Vista Immersion ExperimentThe Vista Immersion Experiment
Yeah, the Zepto logo on the lid is lit. It's very discreet though, you only really notice it in a dark room... not like those obnoxious Mac apple logos :)
It has frozen a few times though, which I find a bit unsettling. Usually been related to things like using the card reader - I don't know if this is a Vista problem or it's a hardware issue. But there definitely was software Vista issues when the filesystem on the SD card from my camera... I'll eventually have to test with another OS, would suck if the hardware is flaky.
So... f0dder, has your new notebook arrived? What do you think of Vista? Inquiring minds want to know... :)-Darwin (October 07, 2008, 07:07 AM)
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Yeah, it arrived thursday (talk about waiting a looong time!). Didn't take long grabbing Vista64-business-SP1 from MSDNAA with 20mbit, and heck it almost took as long installing it (yeah, an exaggeration, but I had expected more of the new image-based install system).
I was shocked to see that the base install took up ~12 gigabytes :o. So I ran the ISO through vLite, and installed again, this time with a 32gig rather than 16gig system partition. Thankfully, the vLited install was down to 6gig, I can live with that I guess.
So... I've used Vista before, but this is the first time I "immense myself in it". My first impression is that "I can probably live with this", and it's less sluggish than I expected. Even though there's "only" 2 gigs of RAM in it, it's comfortable to use, and stuff in general doesn't feel bad. Visual Studio 2008 and Eclipse run fine. The Intel GMA X4500HD seems pretty capable as well, it can run HL2 in 1280x800 with full details pretty smoothly, Aero runs smoothly... mostly.
I don't understand why things like scrolling contact list in MSN and resizing columns feels so damn sluggish. The column-resize thing might be restricted to things like stuff from the control panel, though, and those are generally extremely sluggish to resize. So perhaps those things are written using WPF, and it's WPF that's a sloppy pig? Just guessing, but anything control-panel seems sluggish beyond belief.
The new explorer doesn't really get my fancy. I would probably be pretty darn frustrated if I had to use it, thankfully xplorer2 works fine under Vista. And wtf does a thing like the "Views" in explorer have a vertical slider next to it? O_o - it feels so dumb. Why can't I turn off the bar that has "Organize", "Views" (etc), and the big bar in the bottom that has selection details? At least I can't find any obvious ways to turn those off. So long live x^2!
It also sucks that it's "Aero or nothing" - you can't get a classic look but keep the Aero acceleration. I know there's hacks to use custom themes (WHY can't Microsoft just let third parties do custom themes without the hacky hoops?), and I'll look into that later, but it sucks sucks SUCKS that you're stuck with the pretty much sucky-looking and not very customizable Aero look if you want acceleration (and I do). Why can I no longer "Always show underline for hotkeys" as I could in XP? Why can't you tweak the color of the "selected item bar"? (I already bitched about this). Fortunately, x^2 can be customized, so I can actually see which files I have selected.
I do like the black taskbar though, and the new start menu layout is also pretty great. Still doesn't beat FARR, though!
When resuming from hibernate/standby/locked session, why doesn't the password editbox have keyboard focus?
Do standard fonts like Courier New look differently in Vista, or is it just me?
Consistent with the other Vista machines I've used, the graphics driver seems to crash fairly often, especially during an UAC screen-dimming thing. Sure, it's nice that the graphics driver now runs usermode and can auto-recover, but I get a feeling that the new graphics system by itself is less stable than XP was. Hopefully this matures with SP2 or Windows 7 ::)
I don't find UAC all that annoying, btw. Sure, I disabled it temporarily while setting up the machine, but once that's done, it's not that bad. I probably do mess around with system settings a bit more than the usual Vista user though, so the popups do annoy me a bit every now and then - IMHO it should be possible to elevate yourself for a time period like a couple of minutes, so you could do whatever administrative tasks with only one UAC popup.
More to follow.
f0dder:
Oh, forgot to mention: the laptop is made in a "soft touch" material - reminds me a bit of the rubbery wet-suit stuff. Pretty nice and comfortable to the touch. And the keyboard feels just right, I'm inclined to go hunting for a desktop keyboard with the same button resistance (though I'm afraid that means I'll have to shell out for one of those insanely expensive DiNovos).
MrCrispy:
Ed Bott has a very helpful series of articles on new Vista installs. I like these because they don't contain any of the usual voodoo registry tweaks and make sense.
These are multi-part -
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=466
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=479
nontroppo:
Thanks for the write-up. I'd also done a 1 month Vista SP1 (32bit) immersion on a Dell workstation over the summer, and ended up preferring it to XP overall.
I like the new explorer, and though the view controls are pretty strange from an XP user point-of-view, I got to like them. I refused to install FARR to see how the Start menu could work (as I'd done in Leopard with Quicksilver). FARR was missed throughout, I found the experience pretty poor, but as a launcher it is better than nothing (i.e. XP functionality). Spoilt by Spotlight, I had high expectations for unobtrusive content searching from the start menu, but even after forcibly enabling content indexing, the experience was poor and unreliable. That is really a shame, and something I hope is substantially improved for Win 7. More metadata, robust search and extensibility is my wanted features on this.
Performance was adequate (NVidia 8600GT), though Word 2007+Vista can feel like running in snow sometimes. I would get freezes every so often too, but I never could track it down with process explorer. XP, Ubuntu and Leopard all felt faster on the same machine though in "smoothness". And start times of Vista were slower than the others (shutdown was faster than XP though). Sleeping the machine was much more reliable than under XP. As everyone and their dog has commented, Vista demands good hardware. Having used two different "economy" laptops (1GB RAM) with Vista home of friends, the experience is miserably poor. But the Dell workstation was well specced enough overall.
The lack of attention to detail in Aero is consistent with MS's inconsistency on UI polish. As an example, the window border has a cyan "highlight" on the right+bottom edge, as if incident light is reflected within the "glass". But the cyan colour never changed when the UI colours did (reflected light would be filtered by the glass it passed through in reality), breaking the sense of realistic modeling. Having this bright cyan pixel border of an red-tinted glass is just sloppy. It would be trivial to modify it based on the UI colours. There are several "fit-and-finish" bits like this, but it's hardly a major issue...
I *love* the new fonts, beautifully designed, though limited in unicode extent (hopefully they will grow) and sometimes I saw really poor kerning. I'm not sure if that was Windows poor font handling or specific to the new fonts. Vista's font management is still poor. Nevertheless, the fonts themselves are on all of my machines (as they come with MS Office for PC and Mac), and I use Consolas as my monospaced font of choice for programming everywhere. :-*
In the end though, as one uses Vista one keeps finding the old XP dialogs "under-the-skin", so it really feels like a modified XP over time. I think continuity is good, but some preferences dialogs could desperately do with a clean-sweep design and it feels a bit pick-and-mix design-wise.
UAC *did* intensely annoy me after a couple of weeks. At first I appreciated the security. But over time you do end up just clicking to get rid of it. And working round it in my Matlab programming was annoying as hell. I turned it off after 3 weeks.
Never heard of Zepto, but it looks a nice laptop. Is the soft touch like on the old thinkpads?
J-Mac:
I was OK with my Vista Ultimate notebook, purchased in late March this year until I lost my event log (event viewer in XP) after about two weeks. Searched around and though I found a lot of others with the same problem - no fix. Also, I could not install SP1 - failed in eight attempts. Grrrr. Contacted the Microsoft Vista SP1 support team, especially formed for problems like this. Two weeks of tests and tweaks with no fix. The tech gave up on it.
Then I found a thread on the Microsoft Support users forum and a guy there diagnosed the issue as changes to the Access Control List caused by two successive MS Auto-Update patches. After a bunch of testing he fixed his and posted the method here. I did the same fix and got it fixed myself.
Great! Got my event log back again and all is exceedingly faster than XP ever was. I'm happy - for a short time.
Then I installed SP1, which now worked thanks to that fix. And now my startup is at least twice as long, as is shutdown. What the hell happened? Worse yet, the Windows SxS folder has suddenly grown to just under 8 GB! Looked around and I find that this is.....NORMAL??? For SP1??? What is normal about that? Can I delete it - got a very emphatic NO from Microsoft. Does it benefit me? No, said they. It just is. Period. Deal with it - after all, I was told, with HDD's so large nowadays what's 8 GB? (Not joking there - that's what I was told.)
So now I am kinda wondering if I should reinstall and go the same route that lost me my Event Log, but left me without SP1. Actually ran much better then.
Jim
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